Bolivia: Living the high life amidst an abundance of political protest

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Santa Cruz

After our rather long bus journey across the Chaco, we pulled into Santa Cruz´ huge and chaotic bus station where Chris tried to get some money out of an ATM whilst hoards of small children clung onto the back of his rucksack seeing if they could persuade him to part with a few dollars, before we took a very cheap taxi across town in search of a hostel and some dinner. Finding a fairly central place to stay proved not to be too much of a problem, and a few blocks from this we came across a fairly non-descript looking Italian place which we decided would suffice for a bite to eat before we went to catch up on some much needed sleep. What we hadn´t realized was that we had selected the best pizza place in the world. The pizzas were absolutely amazing, with thin bases, and huge amounts of delicious topping. So good and so cheap that we returned the following night for more of the same.

Now Santa Cruz definitely felt a bit more edgy than anywhere we´ve been of late. On arrival, our hostel owner warned us not to take anything out with us except for the cash that we needed, and by night the city surrounds were poorly lit with people lurking in the shadows. Not helping our feelings of safety were the news articles played throughout the city of increasing gang violence in the area including a shooting in the city centre in broad daylight. Like Brixton in the UK (well, except for the climate, culture and architecture), it was alright to visit, but not really the kind of place where we wanted to hang around for too long, and so the decision was made that after a couple of nights, and having seen the main attractions of the city (a cathedral and a very concrete park), we would make a swift exit to one of Bolivia´s slightly more easy-going cities.

Sucre

One of the plus points about getting a bus to Sucre was that it would have been cheap - about twelve pounds for a twenty hour trip on a winding, unsealed road over the mountains. However, that was it as far as the positives were concerned, and so, just before embarking on a trip back to the bus station, we thought we´d check the price of flights. When they turned out to be double the cost of the bus, but only involve half an hour in a Boeing 737, even Emma was convinced.

Santa Cruz airport was great, a bit chaotic, but great. Despite being fairly small, it managed two restaurants, was free from international marketing and had three shops, one of which was a butchers.

We arrived in Sucre on time and headed straight out to the market for breakfast where all manner of fresh and not so fresh food and drink was on offer. As a city, Sucre was very pretty, there were lots of very well maintained gardens and plazas and lovely houses all painted white with terracotta roofs. There were also more churches and museums than you could hope to visit in a month, and so there was plenty to keep us occupied. Having orientated ourselves to the city, we stayed one night in a budget hostel, getting used to the slightly cooler surrounds at 2700m, before relocating to a beautiful boutique hotel for a few nights for our anniversary. It was stunning, with a lovely courtyard, ginormous buffet breakfast and roof terrace. Emma had a duvet, heating and mini-bar, Chris had a balcony where he could sit and cool off. It was almost perfect. That was until it became apparent that Emma had unintentionally chosen to sample from the food in the market that fell into the ´not so fresh´category. The next few days were subsequently spent close to our very shiny and sparkly bathroom as Emma didn´t feel so well for the duration of our anniversary and beyond.

A few days later, Emma had just about recovered enough to pack her bags, and we left our beautiful hotel and moved into a cheaper cute B&B around the corner. Although we hadn´t seen much of the city (despite having been there for nearly a week), we were agreed that it had a nice feel to it and so decided to stick around for a bit. Helping our decision was the news that all routes out of the city had been blockaded by lorries and trucks protesting about pay and conditions, and so it turned out that we probably wouldn´t have been able to leave anyway, even if we wanted to!

Wanting to make the most of our time there, we both enrolled in Spanish classes at one of the local schools, a bit surprised to find out that the minimum commitment was four hours per day! Emma´s Spanish wasn´t too bad to start with and so she focused on a bit of tricky grammar in the classroom, whilst Chris went to cafes and museums with his teacher and ate lots of icecream. Bob was going to take some classes, but dropped out soon after discovering that there weren´t many other sheep around to converse with and that all the llamas speak quechua, a native Andean indigenous language. Meanwhile, Emma and Chris´ days were spent going to classes, doing homework in cafes and bars, and eating copious amounts of really great food at a multitude of restaurants in the city, many of which had great veggie options which seemed to be as popular with the locals as they were with tourists. (Fortunately on realizing this, Emma´s tummy felt a lot better and events of anniversary-gate were soon forgotten.)

Somehow, in between learning the lingo, sampling local wines and beers, and munching our way through platefuls of llama steaks, peanut soup, cheesy quinoa pie and chocolate torte, we did manage to get around quite a few of the local tourist attractions, visiting some great museums with ancient colonial buildings, paintings, indigenous art, costumes and masks. There was also an abundance of churches and monastries, an immense cemetery catering for everyone from prince to pauper, a giant cathedral complex and a multitude of small plazas where we could while away our time. A plentiful supply of small shops selling pretty locally produced textiles and various other handicrafts could have spelled disaster for both our bank balances and our backpacks, but fortunately Emma by-and-large managed to refrain. Unfortunately she didn´t do quite so well in the many chocolate shops around the city, citing the excuse of having a ´calorie debt´ to make up after a period of illness. We subsequently had a few bags of truffles and sampled some of the best hot chocolate possible (made using slabs of real chocolate, bits of which stick to the glass for you to scrape off when you´ve finished drinking. Amazing).

Inspite of the road blocks, on our second Sunday there, we did manage to get a bus out of town a little way to the small town of Tarabuco, home of the Yampara culture. Although quite touristy, we had a nice day exploring the small traditional village, eating, drinking and shopping. With temperatures set to get even colder as we head to higher altitudes, Emma invested in a giant poncho made from soft alpaca wool. Despite looking not dissimilar to a walking woolly tent, she's now happily feeling much warmer in colder climes.

We were lucky that our stay in Sucre coincided with the yearly colourful, beer-fuelled Mayday parades and went to the main plaza to watch the endless processions, with marching bands and scores of people dressed in traditional costume dancing their way through the streets, interspersed with crowds from workers unions, out with flags, banners and drums to protest about all manner of work-related issues, whilst their comrades manned the lorries and trucks of the blockades around the city.

Potosí

After many days of hearsay and rhubarb, the roadblocks were finally lifted, albeit temporarily. We were warned that things could change on a day-by-day basis and so taking our chances, we hopped in a share-taxi and headed to pastures new. Well, not exactly pastures, we actually ended up in Potosí, reportedly the highest city in the world at 4060 metres above sea level, a barren mining community surrounded by a dusty red mountainous landscape. Fortunately on the day we arrived, Potosí was blockade free, however this soon changed and they were reinstalled the next day, meaning that we had essentially moved from one blockaded city to another! Unfortunately, Emma, having developed the habit of eating anything and everything that appears to be vegetarian from a wide variety of sources, once more succumbed to food poisoning and so was again out of action for a few days and not overly keen to travel.

For those working in Potosí´s mines, conditions are, by all accounts, pretty bad, with life expectancy between 40 and 45 owing to exposure to toxic substances in the mines causing various nasty lung diseases. From what we could gather, it was mainly miners that were blocking the few roads coming out of Potosí, calling for better work conditions and (understandably) for retirement age to be reduced to 40. Not quite as bad as the UK's miner's strikes of days goneby, the roadblocks did none the less slow us down a little and meant we couldn't leave the town until the weekend when they were temporarily lifted. In the meantime, aside from Emma being a bit poorly, we did venture out and visited various museums, and had an interesting tour of the Cathedral, which was in the process of being restored, complete with a Biblical knowledge quiz (all in Spanish) from our excellent and thoroughly entertaining guide.

Uyuni and the salt flats

We left Potosí in a minibus, crossing barren, rocky landscape, passing small villages and herds of llamas, eventually reaching the small town of Uyuni, on the edge of Bolivia's famous salt flats. The next day, we joined four others in a jeep and ventured off, with a guide and driver, into the no-mans land that lies between Uyuni and the Chilean border. Before reaching the flats, we stopped off at a large steam engine graveyard full of old rusting locomotives previously used to carry passengers and goods between Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. From there we continued on to the vast expanses of the salt flats where we had fun climbing on piles of mined salt and visited some of the towns on the outskirts of the flats where the salt was processed. Randomly positioned in the middle of the salt flats, we had an interesting stroll across some small rocky islands jutting out of the salt where giant cacti grew, before spending a cold night in a house made of salt blocks on the edge of the flats.

Our journey continued as we continued to climb in altitude approaching the border with Chile. The expanses of salt were replaced by multicoloured lagoons packed with flamingoes and fields of geysers and mudpools. The scenery was truly amazing, but it was incredibly cold. It seems that those living in the small settlements near the salt flats have yet to discover the joys of heating, or even fire, with even Chris making use of a hat and scarf at times. Fortunately, we had stocked up on drugs to prevent altitude sickness, and so even when we went above 5000m, Emma was fine (albeit mildly hypothermic).

After three days of travelling across some incredibly surreal scenery, we arrived at the Bolivian border with Chile, where we left the jeep and our fellow travelling companions, and caught a bus to the small oasis of San Pedro de Atacama, in the middle of Chile's Atacama desert.



Things we have learned so far in Bolivia

If you want to have a great pizza, forget Italy, head to Santa Cruz (but do be careful in those backstreets).

Hot chocolate on the other hand is best found, not in Belgium or Switzerland, but in Sucre. Who'd have thought it.

Emma needs to be a bit more selective regarding her food choices. There's possibly only so much food poisoning that Bolivian plumbing can cope with.

Salt bricks provide great insulation when used to construct houses, you do however have to get the building warm first, which at over 4000 metres and in the absence of a heat source, is no mean feat.

When travelling through Bolivia, it´s probably best to allow a bit of extra time, owing to the multitude of road blocks that seem to be in place for a wide variety of reasons. The expression ´jumping on the bandwagon´ springs to mind.

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Comments

[Carolyn]

Emma ill - badnews
Your Spanish must be mega. Our septic tank is in sympathy with local plumbing. What a trip to remember for ever.